Back to the blackboard for online courses

Hey there, time traveller!This article was published 19/11/2013 (1115 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ST. LOUIS -- Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun -- former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity -- just admitted to Fast Company's openly smitten Max Chafkin his company's courses are often a "lousy product."

This is quite a "pivot" from the Sebastian Thrun who less than two years ago crowed to Wired the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the "lousiness" of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room with them -- and, accordingly, Chafkin's unabashed display of sycophantic longing has blazed up the academic Internet.

But what is the big deal about Thrun's pivot, and why are academics and higher-ed writers alternately wary and gleeful about it? On the surface, Thrun appears duly chagrined his brainchild has failed the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to learn for free. And on the surface, the new direction of Udacity, which is to leave the university environment and focus on corporate training courses, seems appropriate: Sure, go "disrupt" a bunch of corporations, they love that kind of thing.

What's got the academic Internet's frayed mom jeans in a bunch, however, is Thrun's alleged mea culpa is actually a you-a culpa. For Udacity's catastrophic failure to teach remedial mathematics at San Jose State University, Thrun blames neither the corporatization of the university nor the Massive Open Online Course's use of unqualified "student mentors" in assessment. Instead, he blames the students themselves for being so poor.

The way Fast Company has it, Thrun chucks those San Jose State students under the self-driving Google car faster than he chugs up a hill on his custom-made road bike, leaving a panting Max Chafkin in the dust to ponder the following Thrunism: "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives... It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit."

The problem, of course, is those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. "MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses," Jonathan Rees noted. "However, the masses at San Jose State don't appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer." Thrun's cavalier disregard for the San Jose students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever -- that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education.

It is more than galling Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the "correspondence" course ("TV/VCR repair"!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don't fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let's give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don't have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore.

Successful education needs personal interaction and accountability, period. This is, in fact, the same reason students feel annoyed, alienated and anonymous in large lecture halls and thus justified in sexting and playing World of Warcraft during class -- and why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

Schuman is an education columnist for Slate and adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

History

Updated on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at 8:34 AM CST: adds image

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